Redemption Arc

In June last year I gave a talk at a prize launch in Cambridge. Afterwards, I talked to a young man called Jack Merritt. Clever, energetic, and idealistic in the best possible sense, he said he was involved in some kind of criminal justice project and would like to talk more about it. I didn’t quite catch what it was about but handed over my card. A week later, an invitation arrived to speak at an event he was running in the autumn. The topic was to be something about technology and justice. Jack mentioned a piece I’d written about the Internet of Things and wondered if I could do something similar, but for his audience, a mix of current and recently released prisoners taking part in an education scheme run by Cambridge University. The project was called Learning Together. It gets university students and prisoners to study criminology together, and it’s based on reciprocity and respect.

I’ve always believed in the principle of rehabilitation, of course. Sorrow, regret, forgiveness, redemption; if we don’t practice these things individually we can’t live collectively in safety and in hope. Looking at the website, it was just the sort of project we need to have and should hope people are there to run. But I had misgivings about my own moral position. Someone I love deeply had, not long before, been the victim of a serious criminal offence. The offender was now behind bars.

Some things cannot and must not be forgiven. They don’t ever go away. Trauma is outside of time. It is always now and it has always just happened, even as we learn to build more of ourselves around it to make it smaller. There is no tidy sequential way to process, resolve and forgive. It can never have not happened. We can never leave it behind. But nor can we live inside it daily and survive. I don’t know a way to wish wholeness to those who have done such wrongs and still be a person who willingly carries some of the pain of the person I love who was hurt. I carry that pain out of love and out of my own need, because it is what is given to me to do. I don’t have the right to forgive trespasses against others and nor do I want to.

And yet we cannot throw people away.

I had liked the way Jack described his project as we chatted over oily and surprisingly tasty finger-food. He seemed both charged with serious purpose and also light with, I suppose, a generalised kind of joy? Well, he was young, I thought. But also, he seemed to have found a way of being very much himself and not a typical Cambridge post-grad, of existing quite comfortably in that environment – neither conceding to it nor rubbing against it. So I went.

I got to the venue, St John’s College in Cambridge, a bit early, for once in my life. There were mounted displays of prisoners’ work – mostly letters, I think, and some drawings. I wandered around with a cup of tea and a sandwich. There’s a lot of finger-food in my life. Microphones, introductions and finger-food. It’s a slightly lonely thing, going to different places to give talks and speeches. I’m kind of central to the event but I don’t usually know many people at it, so I’m also surplus to social requirements. It was a relief when Jack and his colleague Gareth bounced up and took me in hand. They were brimming. The morning of their all-day event had gone well. Everyone was there who could be there – students, success stories, teachers and organisers – and the video link-up with the prisons was working well. We went upstairs to another wood-panelled, high-ceilinged room, built for theology lectures. The session I was to be part of began, and I realised I’d stumbled onto something special.

Learning Together had been set up a couple of years before by two lecturers, Amy Ludlow and Ruth Armstrong. They were both there, and so was the person who spoke before me, an ex-prisoner, who talked about what he had learned and how his life was going, how he was trying to be a good father to his daughter. The atmosphere was at once warm and serious. You know how organisations are sometimes so coloured by the temperaments of those who have created them? I so often see institutions warped by, for want of a better term, the original sin of their founders’ intents, that it was almost shocking to suddenly be in the presence of a good idea, executed well, for the best of reasons, and with and in – and there is no other way to say this – love.

I would not describe the love I was briefly part of that day as a steely love, though that’s the way the metaphor leans; an iron hand in a velvet glove, those thoughtful and energetic women insisting on seeing more in the offenders than the offenders thought themselves capable of. No, this was more a mahogany kind of love; tough but with just a little give, weathered and crafted by artisans who know their stuff and polished by daily human touch, knotted by loss of limb, beautiful and practical and under-valued as ‘brown furniture’ tends to be. A good portion of the audience was on day-release from prison, and Amy, Ruth, Jack and Gareth seemed to know everyone by name, their stories and their progress, too. Everyone was held in mind. One person’s graduation felt like the shared achievement of everyone there.

Soon it was my turn. Jack did the introductions with that same lightness of touch and seriousness of intent that seemed to characterise him.

My talk was about algorithmic justice, if that’s not an oxymoron. It whipped through some well-worn points about bias in data collection, analysis and decision-making. I also touched on the literature about parole boards and decision-fatigue – how decisions to release prisoners track closely to the time of day and how long people have been sitting – as a motivator to replace them with more consistent machines. The heart of the talk was not the debate on human versus algorithmic decision-making, but the weight of the exchange that happens between the person who has been convicted of a crime and the judge who sentences them for it.

I’ve lost the notes. I must have spoken from points scribbled down on the train. But the conclusion went something like; judges are fallible. Their biases and flaws can be horrifying, but there is a moment when they look at the convicted criminal and that person can look back, and I believe there is a mammalian sort of equality in that moment. There is a seeing and being seen that affords a necessary respect. It’s not a reciprocity but it is a shared something. The judge and the offender briefly share the same space and same central concern, the same poor quality of light, the same under-heated, dilapidated court house. Judges are flawed. That’s kind of the point. Judges judge us. And we judge them, too.

I’m not sure how much of it landed with the prisoners. I imagine that in the moment of being sentenced, you are just trying to hold it together, and if you think about the judge at all, it’s not to reflect in watered down psychoanalytic terms on the importance of being truly seen. Those I spoke to afterwards seemed happy enough, though, and the teachers and organisers warmed strongly to the theme. After all, the reason we were all there was a programme that reaches for small but significant equalities by placing students and prisoners on the same level, that of people simply trying to learn.

I was glad to be there, and it was hard to be there. I talked to a couple of the guys. Just as you don’t ask soldiers if they’ve ever killed anyone, you don’t ask prisoners what they’ve done. But while before, I’d have bumped along, relating to those men in a purely ‘in the moment’ way, almost prideful in my disinterest, now I felt the need to hold the truth of serious wrongs in my mind while we spoke. I remember thinking, as I listened to a man who’d served a long sentence, in speaking to you warmly and quite obviously wishing you well, am I betraying the people you hurt? I carry a pain like theirs with me. I carry someone else’s pain and I do not want to put it down. I hold it close to my chest, I hug it tight. If I had to picture the pain I would say it was a backpack worn on my front, not my back. I fold my arms in front of it and I want you to know it is there. When someone dies, our love for them is transmuted to grief. When someone is badly hurt, some of our love for them turns into pain. I’d as much let that pain go as I’d let go of their hand if they reached for mine in the night.

On the train home I thought about people like Jack who are young but the very opposite of naïve. How forgiveness and recovery are not located in the same feelings or even the same people, and yet they can still work. How each needs to know the other exists. How this helps, yes, but how nothing will ever be enough.

Jack Merritt died yesterday. He was killed in the attack on London Bridge, at a prisoner rehabilitation event nearby. The attacker was apparently tagged but otherwise at liberty, and had previously requested de-radicalisation treatment but not received it. Jack’s father, correctly predicting the political use to which this attack would be put, said today;

“My son, Jack, who was killed in this attack, would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily. R.I.P. Jack: you were a beautiful spirit who always took the side of the underdog.

[…] Cambridge lost a proud son and a champion for underdogs everywhere, but especially those dealt a losing hand by life, who ended up in the prison system.”

I can only imagine the unbearable pain of Jack’s family. He was exceptional, delightful, committed and a lot of fun. Jack and his colleagues at Learning Together did hard, necessary, clear-eyed and loving work, work that is so much harder than the base, punitive cant the Prime Minister dared to utter on London Bridge today.

We go on.

I believe we can help people who have done terrible things to see themselves by seeing them, really seeing them. We can suggest how they might renew themselves by finding even the smallest, pea-sized amount of love we have, and offering it with an open hand. I believe all this and when Jack invited me, I found I could be near it and act in a small way to help it to flourish, but I could not do it myself. I am grateful to Jack and to everyone who does this hard work, and I am more sorry than I can say that his work is done.